Japan executes pachinko parlour arsonist
The man doused a pachinko parlour near his home in Osaka with petrol and set it on fire, killing four customers and one employee.
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TOKYO: Japan hanged on Friday (Aug 21) a man convicted of a 2009 arson attack on an Osaka pachinko parlour that killed five people, with the prisoner, as usual, informed shortly before his execution.
It was Japan's first hanging since Takahiro Shiraishi, the "Twitter killer" who murdered and dismembered nine people, was put to death in June 2025.
Sunao Takami, the man executed on Friday, doused a pachinko parlour - a popular game mixing pinball and a slot machine using small steel balls - near his home in Osaka with petrol and set it on fire, killing four customers and one employee.
"This incident resulted in extremely serious consequences ... and sent shock waves through society and instilled a deep sense of fear," Justice Minister Hiroshi Hiraguchi said.
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"As minister of justice, I ordered the execution of the death sentence after giving the matter the most careful consideration possible," Hiraguchi told reporters.
He also said that Takami, 58, was only informed of his impending execution on Friday morning, as is the standard practice in Japan.
Broadcaster NHK said he was hanged in Osaka.
"This is because there is concern that notifying the prisoner before the execution date could destabilise their emotional state, and it is believed that doing so might actually cause them undue suffering," Hiraguchi said.
GLOBAL RISE
Japan and the United States are the only two G7 countries to still use capital punishment, and surveys suggest there is strong support among the Japanese public.
Amnesty International said in May that recorded executions worldwide rose 78 per cent in 2025 to 2,707, the highest number documented by the rights group since 1981.
Iran put at least 2,159 to death, more than double the 2024 number, a minimum of 356 in Saudi Arabia, 47 in the US and 17 in Singapore, according to Amnesty.
"The 2025 total does not include the thousands of executions that Amnesty International believes continued to be carried out in China, which remained the world's leading executioner," it said.
A Japanese government survey in 2024 found that 83 per cent of respondents considered the death penalty "unavoidable".
Support for abolition, however, rose to 17 per cent from 9 per cent five years earlier.
The justice ministry told AFP last year that Japan carried out one execution in 2022, three in 2021, three in 2019 and 15 in 2018.
There were around 100 people on death row.
SARIN ATTACK
Among those executed in 2018 included guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo's subway system that killed 14 people.
Japanese law stipulates that executions must be carried out within six months of a final verdict after appeals are exhausted.
In practice, however, most inmates are left on tenterhooks in solitary confinement for years - and sometimes decades - with sometimes severe consequences for their mental health.
The government is also accused of a lack of transparency, as the justice ministry only began disclosing the names of executed inmates in 2007.
There have also been a number of wrongful convictions.
Most famously, Iwao Hakamada spent decades on death row over a 1966 quadruple murder before being released in 2014 and fully exonerated in 2024 at the age of 88.
A court ruled that investigators had tampered with evidence and said he had suffered "inhumane interrogations meant to force a statement".
Hakamada was the fifth death row inmate granted a retrial in Japan's post-war history. All four previous cases also resulted in exonerations.
Rights groups have also criticised what they call "hostage justice" when suspects spend sometimes years in pre-trial detention under pressure to confess.
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